L’antique, l’authentique : Alexander Kluge ou les métamorphoses d’Hermès

Abstract

Every era has an ideology: a “necessary fake consciousness” as Marx used to define it. This is true for the modern Europe that has arisen from the French Revolution as well as for Antiquity. The poetry of Antiquity was in some cases an imitation of past models and in other cases the expression of an all-encompassing world concept: ideology as a means to understand the world, as a source of “sense”. Alexander Kluge’s last movie Nachrichten aus der ideologischen Antike : Marx, Eisenstein, das Kapital, does not seek to resuscitate Marx with yet another Marxist breviary. It appears as if he considered Greek art as belonging to the past, but at the same time he acknowledged it as the testimony of “normal children” and thus as a potential role model for modern civilisation. According to this idea, Marx and Eisenstein should be considered as representatives of an “Ideological Antiquity”. Under this perspective, assuming that the ideas of Marxian analysis are in no way obsolete is not merely the product of ideology. Reading Capital from the perspective of Ovid’s Metamorphoses thus becomes the best antidote to dogmatism as well as a suitable and clever solution to the question.